BY JEANNETTE K. ARCHER

ONVERSION" IS A WORD I'VE NEVER cared for: its connotation runs a little too close to "brainwashing" for me. I was recently delighted, then, to discover a footnote for "being converted" in my version of Isaiah: "to come back." This is a story about coming back.

The essential background is this: I was raised an Adventist. I gradually deserted God. Although I initially blamed the desertion on wounds inflicted by fellow Adventists, I have since recognized two factors on which I must place more genuine blame. The first was lack of time, with the associated lethargy that the strain of my cramped life produced. The second was a profound spirit of rebellion.

I had made some weak attempts at coming back to God before. All had failed in a matter of weeks. This time the crisis was an intersection of stresses rather than a single trauma.

Stretched to the Breaking Point
In my job as a university professor I was struggling through a month of deadlines. The most serious of these was an imminent pair of visits to other universities at which I was to present ongoing research. The research had not progressed as quickly as I'd expected; and as the trip approached I found myself working through most nights and plagued by panic attacks through the others.

Concurrently, my husband's long-term dissatisfaction with his job was approaching a crisis stage. With a near miss at an alternate career opportunity, he sank into despair the Friday before my trip. Too exhausted to cope, I grabbed our dog and fled to a nearby park.

While sauntering, I wanted to pray as a lost child wants its mother; but I couldn't. Each time I tried I was silenced by the thought of how galling it was to call now upon this God whom I had otherwise ignored, and how He had every right to scorn this latest flash of desperation to bail me out of a jam. I murmured, mingling agreement with my less-than-hopeful inner thoughts and the conviction of my inadequacy to deal with my life any longer. My voice rose, almost as if to convince God of the belief that He was forever supposed to be there for me.

"How does one come back?" I finally blurted out.

It was almost audible, and it startled me. I began arguing: even if I worked from now through my Monday morning departure, the best I could hope for was to avoid embarrassing myself. Probably, I countered, the "voice" was the subliminal wish of my sleep-deprived psyche.

Ultimately, I concluded that resting on the Sabbath was simply logical: making some small, blatantly unself-serving step of faith was exactly how a person like me could begin to come back. I determined not to turn it into a bargain: I would observe the Sabbath as free as humanly possible of the expectation that God should bail me out in return. My goal was to keep the day "holy," if I could figure out what that meant anymore.

Not finding any helpful references to "holy" in my tiny concordance, I finally settled for the familiar admonition in Isaiah 58: "If you turn back your foot . . . from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly; then you shall take delight in the Lord" (verses 13, 14).*

The Sabbath passed, alternately restless and peaceful. I began working again about 8:30 p.m.

Starting Over
I found the mistake at 11:00 p.m. It astonished me--smack in that part of my work I'd considered most solid. I scribbled feverishly until 2:00 a.m., desperate to convince myself that this worst-case scenario could not be true. I trudged to bed for a two-hour nap, convinced that I was ruined. I spent the better part of the next day trying, as compensation, to write computer programs that would support other parts of my work; ultimately none of it worked. Around 5:00 p.m. Sunday I determined that my mistake from the previous night was an omission rather than "wrong," but there was no time to fill in the gap. I wrote the first visual aid for my presentation at 7:30 p.m. I finished the last at 9:30 Monday morning and hopped into the car for the 90- minute drive to my first appointment.

An hour into the trip I fell asleep at the wheel and nearly drove into the highway guardrail. After a 15-minute nap and a hefty dose of coffee, I was back on the road. Because of the delay caused by my nap, I was hustled off to lunch immediately upon arrival. Still running late, I had to present my work directly after lunch without even a moment to glance at my visual aids.

God gave me a miracle. Not only did the talk go smoothly, but I was apparently "impressive." I had a lovely visit. That evening I made an uneventful two-hour trip to my second destination; that visit was also successful.

Say what you will about the capacity of the mind to deal with difficult situations: I am absolutely convinced that in my ragged condition I could not have pulled off the success of that trip by myself. Praise God, He must truly give us the things we desire whenever He can. In my case, I'm not even sure that my unexpected success was "best" for me.

Epilogue
My introductory remarks notwithstanding, God has converted me. He has not brainwashed me: I'm still a pestering questioner, and He has answered all my questions thus far with a compelling blend of "Come now, let us reason together" (Isa. 1:18) and "Be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10).

I use "converted" to mean that I no longer believe that I took the initiative in coming back. Rather, I believe that God took advantage of my distorted motives to bring me back to Him.

I'm struck that in focusing on the Sabbath, Adventists have access to a precious gift. The spirit embodied in the Sabbath captures exactly what is required to seek harmony with a holy God: acclamation of His sovereignty and time to be still in His presence. I believe that this is why God chose the Sabbath as His vehicle for bringing me back, and I have tried (with some variation in rigor) to observe the Sabbath ever since.

My prayer for my former church is that its members will also find a gift in the Sabbath, and that they will find a way to share this gift with their fellow Christians.

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*Texts in this article are from the Revised Standard Version.

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Jeannette K. Archer is a pseudonym.